GoKawiilGitHub is having a tough time. Their uptime (or rather, lack thereof) has become a meme, they’re facing exponential usage growth thanks to AI, and now high-profile projects like Ghostty are moving away. Developers are starting to discuss what they want from an alternative.
I’m thankful for GitHub, but it’s clear which way the winds are blowing. I hope they can fix their stability issues, but this is also an opportunity for the open-source world to try something new. So, what’s next? There are a lot of Git forges out there. Some, like Forgejo, are pretty good. It’s reasonable to predict that many people will move to these, and the ecosystem will become more fragmented.
There are benefits to centralization, and losing these could be painful. I love that most dev tools I use have a GitHub integration, and there’s almost no friction when I want to open an issue in a GitHub project.
This will not be the case in a world of many distinct gitlab.foo.com and forgejo.bar.com instances. Or perhaps everyone moves to some hot-new-AI-first-forge, and then we go through the same cycle of enshittification in 10-20 years.
But we don’t have to live like this. Armin Ronacher puts it well: it should be harder for one company’s drift to become a cultural crisis for everyone else.
I think we already have a promising path ahead: a Git forge built on an open, interoperable protocol.
Specifically, today, this is Tangled. It’s built on the AT Protocol. The details are a little nerdy (I recommend this explainer if you’re interested) but here are the important parts:
Your data (e.g. your repos, the issues you open, the PR comments you write) live on a server you can self-host (or you can use a public, shared server).
A centralized app (like tangled.org itself) aggregates everyone’s data in one place.
It’s all open-source, so if the Tangled devs start veering off course, we can fork it.
... continue reading